Tuesday, July 21, 2015

gender, rebellion + rock 'n' roll

an interview looking back at The Sex Revolts, done a few years ago with Christina Mohr for Missy magazine

You wrote „The Sex Revolts“ together with your wife,
journalist Joy Press – what was it like to write „as one“? (Given that the book
is 17 years old this seems like a very cool gender-bending project!) And why
didn´t you do it again?

It was very enjoyable. We came up with the idea
together during one long conversation after a dinner with a friend who brought
along a musician friend, then in quite a well known underground noise band. And
this musician told a sick joke, seemingly to test how cool we were. The joke
was: “What’s the worse thing about raping a six year old? Having to kill her
afterwards.” We failed the cool test.

Afterwards Joy and I got to talking about why so many bands at that time had
songs about killing women, and we initially envisaged writing a book about
misogyny in rock. But then it seemed more interesting and ambitious to look at
all aspects of gender in rock, from more mystical and positive views of women
in men’s song, to women’s own representations.

There was never any doubt that it
would be a joint project, we conceived it together. Initially we were a little
worried that the stress of doing such a big work – and all the practicalities
and tensions of collaboration --would affect our marriage, but apart from a few
arguments about specific artists, it was a great time for us. We had a project
and a focus and looking back I’m not sure how else we would have spent our time
during those two years. Probably gone to a lot of movies and art museums and so
forth. It was a huge amount of work and
we could easily have spent several more years working on it, but the money ran
out and so we had to speed it up! We wanted to get it out quickly too because
it felt timely: there was a lot of female stuff going on in rock, from PJ
Harvey to the “Angry Women” (Hole, etc) to Riot Grrl and Liz Phair.

My only regret about that book is that it was
so time consuming doing the Sex Revolts that it was taking me away from my new
passion, which was the rave scene.

“The Sex Revolts” was and still is very important for
any feminist rock/pop critic – do you think that there were many changes during
the last two decades concerning women´s appearances in the pop business?

Obviously if we were to do it now there would a whole
bunch of major figures that would have to be dealt with, and would probably alter
the way the book divides things into categories. Everything from the Spice
Girls and the mainstreaming of the “grrrl” idea, to Lady Gaga. The R&B divas and female hip hop artists:
Missy Elliott, Beyonce, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj. In underground rock you have the
rise of synthesiser solo artists like Maria Minerva, Julia Holter, Laurel Halo,
etc, and also figures like Grimes and LA Vampires. And many more…

However many
of these new artists fit into the archetypes and strategies that we described
in the Sex Revolts. For instance Gaga is a development of the Madonna approach to reinvention of personae
and a revelling in posing and artifice.
The R&B divas are a development of the strong woman archetype. And
so forth.

One thing the book doesn’t deal with is gayness in
music, which is a big omission but we felt that the topic was a book in itself,
and possibly not one we were qualified to write about. But perhaps if we were
to do it now, we would feel like we had to deal with that in some way, because
gay performers are more and more prominent.

Not a female performer, but Odd Future, the rap group,
would be a rich subject, in terms of songs about killing women and the twisted negativity
and sick humour of young men. At the same time one of their crew is a lesbian
and their associate Frank Ocean recently came out as gay. So clearly a complex
outfit.

After re-reading “The Sex Revolts” I was wondering why
you do not mention Blondie and Debbie Harry – why? (a very personal question as
I´m a big fan of the band´s early records – and Debbie Harry was a role model
for me as a child… J)

I’m not sure how she slipped through the cracks. I
really like Blondie also. At the start of her career she was considered a punk,
this tough women from New York who was relatively old and experienced compared
with other punks. She managed to keep some of that edge even as she became a
glamour queen and Blondie’s music got more glossy and commercial. Yes, Debbie is an omission, but equally,
there are quite a few important figures left out of The Sex Revolts or passed
over quickly. Unless you want to do an encyclopaedic treatment of the subject,
that’s always going to happen.

What makes you a feminist (or would you call yourself
one)?

Definitely I would identify as a male feminist. It’s partly through life experience and
seeing the things my mother had to deal with. It also comes from reading
Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch at an early age, and then reading other
feminist works like The Dialectic of Sex by Shulamith Firestone, who died recently.

I think even without those inspirations from
real life and from reading books, though, I would probably have absorbed
feminism from the postpunk culture I grew up with. It was a big current in music at the time,
with groups like The Slits, The Raincoats, Delta 5, Au Pairs, and it informed a lot of the music writing I grew up with in the UK music papers,
particularly the NME, which was quite “right on” as we used to say in those
days. Certainly an awareness of sexism and also of the mutability of gender was
very much in the air.

I was also very interested in androgyny, in part
because of an interest in the Sixties and the counterculture, but also that
seemed a big part of music in the early Eighties - -there was a lot of sexually
ambiguous male performers around, a kind of “new glam” spirit.

I should also mention that feminism was strengthened
and expanded for me by friends I made at university, especially a woman called
Hilary Little - who now goes by the name Hilary Bichovsky - who becamepart of the team of people who did the magazines
Margin and Monitor, which was where my first public forays into writing about
pop culture took place. The Monitor crew was a tight group of friends and
kindred spirits, and a lot of ideas were explored, among them radical feminist
ideas.

“Retromania” (which is finally translated into German)
deals with the phenomenon that pop culture / pop music constantly refers to and
reproduces itself while still promising to create something totally new. Which
kind of female retro-models would you define?

I don’t know if there is a particular gender angle to
retromania, although it does seem to be the case that the more chronic kinds of
record collector are male. A lot of the obsessive curating and archiving of the
past seems to be done by men.

Looking at most of the people I critique for
retromaniac tendencies in the book, they tend to be male artists. Although I do
critique the Amy Winehouse/Duffy/Adelle school of soul revival – white British
females of the 2000s who want to sound like black American females of the
1960s.

Another female perpetrator is La Roux, with her
Eighties synthpop. I quite like “In For the Kill” and her general aura of
sullen bitterness. But musically it’s a replay of the Eighties.

When it comes to female pop music role models it´s
always and always again good old Madonna with her ever-new-creation of herself.
Are there any female singers and/or musicians you´d wish they would get the
same public and media attention?

There’s loads of interesting groundbreaking figures in
music history that deserve to get more attention. Kate Bush could always do
with more love. Grace Slick. Siouxsie Sioux has been a little bit forgotten,
but what an amazing force she was, hugely influential.

As a music journalist you´re working in a very
male-dominated area – do you sometimes wish there were more women writing about
pop music? Like Ellen Willis?

Yes. There could definitely be more in the way of
gender parity. However having worked at a music magazine as the reviews editor,
I can attest that part of the problem is that not enough women approach the
magazines in the first place. I think
for every female writer that send in sample reviews in the hope of getting to
write for the magazine, there were five or six letters from aspiring male
writers. Maybe more. Now that may be
because men are more pushy. It may be a circular, self-perpetuating process
where because women don’t see that many female by-lines in a magazine, they
don’t think there’s a place for them there. But at Spin, where I worked for a
year in 1998, we were very conscious of the need to get more female writers in
and that meant actually searching for them. So I would look in small magazines
or fanzines for female talent and track writers down.

When and why did you start writing about music? Do you
remember? Would you describe yourself as a rather nerdy type of guy?

I wanted to be a writer first, being a music
journalist came much later. My parents are both journalists and I grew up in a
literate household, as a child I read a great deal. What I wanted to write at
any given point was based on what I was into. When I was into science fiction,
I wanted to write science fiction novels. When I was into Monty Python, I
wanted to write that kind of surreal comedy. And then when I got into music,
and discovered the music press, it seemed like a field of action. An arena
where you could write about almost anything, in terms of politics or philosophy
or whatever, using music as a prism. And you could write in a very free style.

I wouldn’t describe myself as nerdy – I’m not
particularly good with technology or computers, I enjoy physical activities and
outdoor things. But I was a book-worm as a youth and I did spend a lot of time
indoors, reading and writing and drawing and thinking and dreaming. And
listening too. I was introspective and
still am to some extent.

You´re going on a book tour through Germany presenting
“Retromania” – are you nervous or do you feel comfortable talking about your
favourite subject (pop music)?

I’ve done a lot of public appearances now and so I’ve
got pretty comfortable with it. I can riff out ideas pretty easily in front of
a group of strangers. That is one of the more enjoyable aspects of doing public
events and tours, the question time when you are asked things you’re not expecting.
You have to come up with ideas on the spur of the moment and often I surprise
myself with new thoughts that I would never have had otherwise.

Is pop music still relevant – or has it lost its furor
/ has been replaced by other things like tv series or computer games? (There
may be a difference between young people and older ones, like me)

It’s still relevant – I think as long as people want
to dance and as long as people fall in love, have relationship problems, feel
alienated or restless or uncertain – music will fulfil that function, it will
produce songs that resonate and heal.
But certainly rock and pop music do not seem to have the same privileged
and central role in the wider culture that they did in the Sixties, Seventies,
Eighties and even still the Nineties. Other things like games, social media,
Internet communities, apps, gadgets like smartphones, iPads and so forth –
these seem to be what have caught the imagination of the young generation. My son is just about to turn 13 and he is all
about games and online communities and movie-maker programs and YouTube
oriented stuff. He likes music but it is
a relatively small area of interest, something he hears on the radio or in the
background of games. I can’t imagine him ever buying music. But who knows, when
he becomes a proper adolescent and has hormone-driven emotions and starts to
question things, maybe music will become more important to him. I do think that music has undeniably become
demoted in the scheme of things. It used to be the centre of youth culture and
popular culture, now it is just one of a number of zones that include movies,
games, TV, social media. Todays pop stars try to become transmedia stars as
soon as they can, move into movies and other areas of popular culture.

Songs and movies that make you cry and why (not
necessarily by women):

Just a few songs, because otherwise I’ll be here all
day:

“There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” by the Smiths

I have actually been moved to tears by “Autobahn” and
“Trans-Europe Express” and other songs by Kraftwerk – not because they are
particularly sad but just the sheer splendor and majesty of the music. On my
last book tour of Germany, I got to play “Autobahn” on an actual autobahn,
while watching all those electricity-generating
windwills go past, and I did get teary
eyed.

Movies – too many to
list really. But one is Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout, which is partly because the
film is poignant and beautiful but also because of John Barry’s soundtrack. The last time I saw the film was at a special
screening of the reissued and restored version at a theater in New York.
Afterwards I had to hurry out of the theater and find a quiet place to pull
myself together. The combination of the
movie and the music destroyed me.

Another film that has a devastating effect on me is The
Dream Life of Angels. The second time I saw it was when I had come back from a club
and was slightly drunk and vulnerable,
and it happened to be on TV. I had forgotten how it ends and so when the terribly sad ending came - and it
comes really quick - I was taken by surprise and really shattered. I actually
felt like bashing my brains out against the wall.

In some ways it is pleasing to know that art
can have that kind of effect on you. One of the definitions of art is that it
is a bad experience - -painful or disturbing-- that you voluntarily put
yourself through. A book or movie where what happens actually hurts you.